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Voices

The following represent a random sampling of voices from those activists and organizers who participated in our research project. To see more, refresh this page.  Use the tag cloud to the right to navigate by theme.

Hope and fear for the future

I draw a lot of my inspiration, especially when it comes to environmental activism, from the compassion that I have for the planet, from the emotional connection that I've built to the earth through many excursions, and wilderness trips, and exploring in nature, and the huge amount of appreciation I have for the world around me. So yeah, compassion, that is where I draw a lot of my inspiration from and also a little bit of fear and anger as well....Fear for the future. If nobody does anything then what is our future going to look like?

Leadership not dictatorship

Things can happen awful fast sometimes...and [when it does happen] I think that the Left needs to...be...there to try and pick up the pieces and give it some coordination and leadership. Because I do believe in leadership, I just don't believe in the form of leadership that dictates to everybody what should happen. We've never really had a democracy.

Manipulating choices

I volunteered with an underground midwife....she still caught babies, still did the exact same job...but there was no funding for it, women still paid her out of pocket. So where did that take me? I guess that was a turning point in my politics because it really made me think not just about women's choices and how women conceptualize those choices and manifest them but how...the broader society manipulates women, or offers certain choices for women.

Women, power, and winning

It would be about women recognizing power, women understanding that they hold that power, and that they can exercise that power, and that exercising that power can change society, can change the individual, can change the family, can change the community, can change the society. And that would look not only like women recognizing and exercising that power but the society...recognizing that that power is valid.

Hope and moving beyond

I have tremendous amounts of hope. I don't know what folks who don't have that do….I think in the course of human existence the current system, capitalism…[has had an] incredibly short lifespan. Longer than my life, so there's a sense of perspective, but really in terms of the way that humans have organized, it’s one form amongst many that we've gone through and I think that we can move beyond that.

Precarity and inertia

I think...one of the most present problems right now is...how precarious everything is around us in terms of our living spaces, we have no control over [them], we...pay all this rent [and] it's just burned off….The places we work, we have no control over the vast majority of them so that we're just thrust around here and there. We're fired with no notice, we have to deal with all kinds of unfair working conditions depending on the whim of the employers and this creates a lot of problems for everyone. We're stressed out, we're just left with no energy and time at the end of the day other than to watch TV or zone out or whatever.

Winning right now

So, short term what would winning mean to me? I would like to see the Canada health act pass into legislation right now. I'd like to see [the former] NDP government pushed on a variety of different fronts from below to keep it to the minimum promises it made and I'd like to see the beginnings of building some kind of mass progressive movement here in Nova Scotia. That to me would be the short term win.

Activism and marginality

Just looking at our immediate context right here in Halifax...looking at...the organizations that people have to fight through right now, the only ones that we see around us are these unions that right now are pretty backwards….[T]hey don't really fight anything except legal strikes which are almost nothing these days, small windows, pickets that aren't really challenging the company. I think for me it matters who is showing up, who are the people that are involving themselves and I'm seeing the activist community, a loose knit group of people involved in different NGOs in the city, people involved in student activism, that are showing up at all these different events but these aren't the actual body of workers that are out there. This isn't like a working class movement and if it's not a working class movement it doesn't really have the potential to transform conditions in our society.

Demonstrating success

When most people think of politics, they think of electoral politics. So while many of us may think of this in much broader terms as far as measuring winning I think we have to give ourselves things that can be actually measured and [success in] electoral politics in the next two to five years probably wouldn't make sense for any kind of political movement that would develop. So I don't think that that would be on the goal post but it would certainly involve engagement with that political process in some way. So we actually have to be able to win things because that's the only way that we convince people that we can succeed.

Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will

"Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will," it's a famous saying by Gramsci. In other words you know rationally that the chances of doing anything radical are very small but you do it anyway. You fight anyway. You cannot have optimism of the will without some idea that it would be possible to have a different world and various institutional things have an impact on people's radical imagination.